'Chris kept everything simple: 'Come here, work hard, dance. Go home, take care of your family, take care of your friends,' ” says Sherman Shoate about his friend and fellow dancer, Christopher Braswell, who died of cancer seven years ago, at age 22.

Shoate directs and stars in “Christopher, for the Love ... a Hip-hop Dance Story.” Mostly dance, but with a loose narrative line, Culture Shock San Diego's evening-length show premieres this weekend at the Lyceum Theatre.

“The show is about the life Chris lived,” Shoate says. “If you want to dance, you can do it. You just have to fight for it and do what you can to make it work.”

That story could apply to Shoate himself. Braswell introduced him to hip-hop classes at Mesa College, where they were students in the late 1990s.

“I was playing football, running track, doing the whole student-athlete thing,” says Shoate, who's now 29. “Chris used to go to watch dance classes. I went with him and thought, 'Oh yeah, I could do that.' ”

Shoate took a class that summer and discovered dancing wasn't as easy as he'd expected. “Sports came naturally to me, and I could dance at a club. But dancing like that, choreographed and to the actual beat ... was new. And it bothered me. It was like a test.”

He and Braswell studied with Mesa College teacher Angie Bunch and auditioned for Culture Shock, Bunch's hip-hop team.

“I got on the team the first year as an alternate, which I probably shouldn't have,” he says, smiling at his former teacher, who's sitting next to him at Culture Shock's spacious Hancock Street dance center in Middletown.

“He was nice to look at,” Bunch teases affectionately.

Shoate hasn't stopped dancing since. He's appeared in music videos with Missy Elliot, Usher and Britney Spears and has toured with TLC, Mary J. Blige, and Destiny's Child.

He's now the director of Culture Shock San Diego's 30-member team, while Bunch heads the dance center, which offers more than 50 classes each week, including hip-hop, tap, salsa, jazz and striptease cardio – “Bring kneepads,” the class schedule advises.

Bunch also directs the nonprofit Culture Shock Dance, Inc., which has branches in eight U.S. cities, Ottawa and London.

The San Diego team, formed in 1993, performs regularly – it's doing 89 shows at SeaWorld this summer, and Culture Shock dancers have been featured in two San Diego Ballet productions.

“Christopher” takes them into new artistic territory, however.

“Our goal is Broadway musical, the acting, the singing, the dancing,” says Bunch, whose background includes jazz dance and musical theater; with her pixieish blond hair, the 47-year-old hoofer looks like a natural to play Peter Pan. “But we're not there yet,” she says. “So this isn't a play or a musical; it's a hip-hop dance story.”

A $10,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation to Shoate as an emerging choreographer provided major funding for the production, which combines set choreography with hip-hop's signature improvisation.

Different guest artists – including Los Angeles-based stepper Khalid Freeman, who's toured with “Stomp” – will change the mix for each performance. Various local crews will also guest.

In the opening, the dancers will freestyle first, then form a cohesive group. “That's what I find the most inspirational and impressive,” Bunch says. “When individuals break out into their own style and then bam, they come together in a unified, powerful army of movement.”

“We push style more than steps,” Shoate says. “Anyone can get the steps. Steps is walking down the street. ... We try to push the style, because that's feelings, that's where your emotion comes in, the passion comes in.

“Once you start feeling the style of what that person is giving you, it's making you grow as a person.”